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Publishers win $19.5M judgment in piracy lawsuit against shadow library
21 May 2026

A coalition of 13 major publishers has won a massive $19.5 million judgment against the controversial shadow library, Anna's Archive.

The ruling was issued by US District Judge Jed S Rakoff in New York, who granted the publishers' requests for a broad permanent injunction.

The order directs over 20 specific global registries, hosts, and service providers to immediately disable access to all remaining domains associated with Anna's Archive.

Publishers accuse Anna's Archive of aiding AI companies
Allegations

The publishers have accused Anna's Archive not just of providing links to pirated books but also of being a major source of training data for AI companies such as Meta and NVIDIA.

The site has been known to evade enforcement by changing domain names when necessary.

This is why the injunction specifically targets technical intermediaries that keep the site online.

Court orders Anna's Archive operators to reveal identities
Identity concealment

The operators of Anna's Archive continue to remain strictly anonymous, a factor that doesn't help their case either.

The default judgment addresses this issue and orders the operators to reveal their identities and submit a sworn statement with valid contact information to the court within 10 days.

However, considering they have previously said they hide their identities to avoid "decades of prison time," it is safe to assume that they will simply ignore this request.

Permanent injunction orders all domain registries to block access
Enforcement challenge

The real power of this default judgment lies in the permanent injunction against Anna's Archive.

It specifically orders "all domain name registries and registrars of record" to permanently disable access to Anna's Archive's domains and prevent their transfer to anyone other than the publishers or music industry plaintiffs in a related case.

The order also covers international hosting providers, who are also ordered not to work with the site anymore.

List of companies that have to block access now
Targeted entities

The injunction specifically names over 20 companies and organizations, including Cloudflare, Njalla, DDOS-Guard, and the domain name registries of Anna's Archive's active domains.

These include TELE Greenland/Tusass (managing the .gl domain), PKNIC (managing the .pk domain), and the National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (managing Grenada's .gd domain).

Unlike the Spotify scrape, which Anna's Archive removed after the music industry's lawsuit, publishers' books are still available on the site.